Your local wild plants

I decided a couple of years ago while examining the plethora of different weed species in my yard that if there was a noxious weed called "toddlerbane" it would have to be lurking somewhere in there.

my mother used to pick dandelions for salads when they were tender before they flowered, they were delicious

dudleyas can't be that prized can they? I see them everywhere in SF, aren't they easy to propagate? maybe there are some rare species

I've never been able to propagate mine, and they do seem to be slow-growing.

all the elderberries blooming now convinced me to try some of the ikea elderflower drink, which was decent. i guess people don't agree whether sambucus canadensis is a subspecies of sambucus nigra or not, but it's kind of interesting that they're so common in both north america and europe.

i meant to try to learn how to distinguish the local species of asters and goldenrods this fall, but i didn't get outside enough and only learned a few. maybe a project for next year.

cut down a few small callery pears, i.e. feral bradford pears, recently and they have some pretty nasty thorns on them! and now that they're blooming you can really see how far they've invaded urban wooded areas. really glad we planted tens of millions of these things all so that we could have white flowers that smell like semen for two weeks in the spring.

circles where are you located, generally. interested in your weeds.

greater kansas city area, usa. i feel like our weeds are similar to what you find in the eastern parts of the country that aren't too far north or south.

some weeds:

https://i.imgur.com/GRHIUHV.jpg
i've seen a lot of yellow rocket blooming during the last week. it looks pretty nice for a weed. it's in a different genus than normal cultivated rocket/arugula.

henbit, purple dead nettle, and ground ivy are all early-blooming mint family members with pink to purple flowers that i see as lawn weeds a lot. http://identifythatplant.com/three-easily-mixed-up-early-spring-plants/

curly dock isn't blooming yet, but it's 3+ ft tall in grassy areas that haven't been mowed, so it's hard to miss.

i'm curious about how ashes are doing in different places. i see a lot of dead ones in the woods, but also an incredible number of saplings, like the dying trees went into overdrive producing seeds. the street trees in my urban-ish neighborhood seem unaffected by emerald ash borer so far.

many of the ash trees in my vicinity are decorated with little signs that say “this ash is covered” or “be a smart ash” with info on the borer situation, and i don’t wanna tone police or nothing because it’s part of a really great local program to get ahead of the tree plague but the signs remind me of the joke about sean connery asking a lady to sit on his face. the trees are mostly looking okay though, hooray for trees!

one of the trails near here has a path that cuts along a hillside and crosses all these scruffy little gullies, and for a few weeks each year the gullies are crowded with mountain lupine blossoms, pink and blue and white and purple, up and down the hillside like flower waterfalls.